Bug Description

THIS IS A META BUG!

The "cant find resource agents" has loads of different causes as seen in the various comments.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/583735
Presents a cause where the startup would time out and trigger the error dialog, even though there was really no error, but akonadi just did not finish starting at the time of testing.

I have this also at the start of Kmail and I still get the "MySQL server failed" message (akonadi-server 1.3.1-0ubuntu2). The most annoying part of it is that if I hit "Cancel" at the akonadi message, then it quits Kmail!

BTW; last week I have removed my .kde dir and all remaining directories mentioning akonadi in my home dir, deinstalled and purged all KDE packages and reinstalled the kdepim packages. Still the same problem :-(

Well, you know how it is, people say this and people say that and yet they do not attach akonadi self-test logs making it absolutely and completely impossible to do anything about this issue, other than bumping the timeout yet again, which of course does only solves 1 of 8 possible causes for the presented error.

Well you can use kontact, it's just not possible to retrieve any addresses from the server, so if you want to write someone an email better have his address ready...
(And nepomuk/virtuoso drives me crazy after I start kontact, as it keepy one CPU busy for more than 16h now, but that's another story...)

"XDG_DATA_DIRS to include /opt/kde/share" is not going to change anything, in the presented forum this ought to fix the issue because the user is running a gentoo-based system and hence his KDE is in a directory other than the default.

The reason it worked for Marcus is something I call the ghost problem. See, the error this bug report complains about, can have a billion reasons to occur and a lot of them involve previously unclean shutdowns or just general weirdness, which means that usually after a 2nd or 3rd start the ssue will not be there anymore because you stack the akonadi parts on top of each other...

If anything you need to purge .local/share/akonadi and .config/akonadi, akonadi is KDE independent.

Anyhow, as for additional information for debugging...
1. kdebugdialog -> turn on everything
2. logout -> login
3. start akonadi by whatever means make sense (make sure the error occured)
4. logout
5. go to a terminal (tty, e.g. by pressing ctrl+alt+f1, you can go back with same for f7 OR f8) and secure the file ~/.xsession-errors
6. login
7. start akonadi (should spit out the error)
8. start akonadi again (should spit out the error or work)
9. start akonadi again (should work)
10. also secure current ~/.xsession-errors (can be from within the session)

Upload all .xsession-errors files AND the akonadi self-test reports (if possible). That should hopefully give an idea why your control process commits suicide and your error logs are dirty.

It is however, entirely possible that you just hit the startup timeout... another Kubuntu dev who is experiencing this issue is currently trying if raising the timeout helps.

Many useability bugs:
- The French localization strings orthographic issues "service...enregistrer" "assuez-vous"
- The error messages are not really helpful. I do not know what is "a resource agent", how and where to set "the XDG_DATA_DIRS environment variable", or how to check that it contains the Akonadi agents. Please someone provide a script.
- The official troubleshooting page says Nepomuk should be enabled in System Preferences/Advanced/Desktop search. That condition should be detected, and the information should be reminded where it matters (i.e. a warning when one is disabling Nepomuk on a system with Akonadi, and a warning when one is starting Akonadi on a system with Nepomuk disabled, with an option to start it.)

(just a small change to the desktop link to work around this bug)
In 2 cases i experienced the problem was that akonadi was not there when kontact loaded the contacts component.. starting akonadi before kontact makes the problem disappear..

OK, I did as you aseked and enabled debugging for everything.
The first xsession-errors was surprisingly short and contained only gnome stuff, but the second one shows interesting elements.
It appears that the timeout theory is not bad. Kontact logs that akonadi had 0 agents and after that akonadi starts to log stuff and reports the agent it found.

That may be true, but nevertheless, it should be fixed ;-)
It's not uncommon to use kontact as gnome user (frankly evolution is IMHO unusable). And when you have to connect to a kolab server you have to use kontact, because it's the only client that supports mail/contacts/calendar besides the webclient, which doesn't support pgp/smime of course...

@Patrick Cornelissen: on a fresh lucid install (twoday) (after adding an akonadi-resource in systemsettigs-advanced-kderesources, adding "personal contacts" and importing my contacts ) the problem exists only on first start of kontact... running "akonadictl start" before makes the problem dissapear .. this is just an observation (and therefore the little workaround does the trick for me)

sorry if i missunderstood the initial bugreport and i am dealing with an other/different situation

See. There is this self-test dialog, that this report is very based on, because otherwise everyone who is affected wouldnt know that they are affected because they simply wouldnt know that it is about resource agents.
So. This very dialog contains like 3 buttons, of which 2 are related to grab the whole log and post it somewhere, or save it. And that is how you make (or in this rather store) an akonadi self-test log.

1. If Kontact is started it displays the akonadi error as described above.
2. If Kontact is closed and restarted the problems multiply.
3. Reason for this is that contact continues to run after X-out. To verify, go to System monitor.
4. If in system monitor one kills kontact then when started again it starts ok
5. As mentioned by xapient these problems do not occur if Akonadi is started separately (ex: using the akonadi tray
utility) and kontact is started after akonadi.

Similar symptoms here, on fresh install of Kubuntu 10.04 AMD64.
Akonadi self test report attached. This is on restart after updates (including kernel, hence the restart), and the Akonadi in system tray said it was running. Kontact started, but Contacts didn't; just grayed out with the red square.

On installing Lucid the link from my address book to the contact file was lost, and that was easy to reinstate. My Akonadi birthday resource reported the error that is the subject of this bug report. I followed the steps in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+source/akonadi/+bug/554514 and substituted the location of my address / contacts file in the command:
export XDG_DATA_DIRS="/location of my contacts file:$XDG_DATA_DIRS",
and all is well now.

It's solvable by doing right click on Akonadi in the system tray and choosing Configure.. and the hitting the Test..-button. Then restart Kontact and everything works. But you have to do that every time you log in to Kubuntu, so that's annoying.

I did the sequence in #16 and here are the akonadi logs
@Harald Sitter: I did not attach the xsession-error files publicly, as they contain a lot of private paths. I can send them to you by mail if you want them .

Just to add to what has already been said - I have this same problem. I am using akonadi to link to a google calender and addressbook but not to my standard kde address book and calendar (I was but stopped because of the problems I was having every time I started up my computer).
I can confirm that if I stop anything and everything related to Kontact, stop Akonadi, start Akonadi, start Koantact all works as expected. But if I let things happen as normal Akonadi complains of no resource agents.
If I stop Kontact and Akonadi and then start Kontact I get the error as well (which I how I generated the selftest attached)

Possible workout:
do not use kontact anymore, only use korganizer: the problem is bypassed... (;--/))
or
first start kaddressbook and wait till the error message disappears (and solves the problem) and then start kontact.

wj - that is even worse a situation. Start korganizer - no errors, akonadi resouce is ticked but no events show up. Untick, tick and the events now show up. shut down korganizer and I am told there is an error saving akonadi resource when not connected (even though the akonadi tray icon shows it is up and running.

tomwu - worked fine after a reboot, I was worried the session restore (or whatever it is that brings up kontact) would get in first but it does not so no extra fiddling required to make your fix work. Thanks

and it mucks up Kopete if the addressbook links are used - it is a real killer if you can't make sensible use of PIM applications
Stoping and starting Akonadi every time you start your computer really would send a new user right back where they came from and is highly irritating for old users who are used to a system that worked before they installed the 'new improved' version (LTS for stability and reliability)

and it solved the problem. I honestly think that this should be considered a high priority bug, since a new user would be baffled for the needs to go through all the hoops to have basic functionality (email!) working...

I'm affected by this as well. When I start kaddressbook, I get these errors and none of my addressbooks don't appear.

I suggest the Importance be raised from Medium to Critical 32 people are marked as being affected, and in some cases the bug represents a major data loss-- my workaround will likely be find the raw data file, and import them to Evolution.

Guys this bug should be highest priority, it is a SHOWSTOPPER!!
An operating system without mail and addresses is doomed! Such a fragile Framework such as akonadi shoud be removed from the distro at this stage of development, it messes it up!
Not only for newcomers, I have accumulated hundrets of addresses o9ver the past years and currently cannot access them!!! this is crazy!

I have installed Lucid on 3 computers, and on non of them akonadi works. All 3 have been new installes but used home dirs from 9.04 and 8.04 kubuntu.

I have tried a lot of things that I found on the web. Some of them could fix the problem only temporarily. (like putting the path on XDG_DATA_DIRS=/usr/share:/usr/share:/usr/local/share
or autostart akonadi).

After I put exported XDG_DATA_DIRS=/usr/share:/usr/share:/usr/local/share my old addresses showed up but the next time I logged in akonadi was dead again, showing me some database issues.

checking strigi in Nepomog config worked for 1 session then nothing worked anymore, but I am not sure whether strigi has been the reason as it appears inactive!?

2010/7/6 schwein <email address hidden>:
> Guys this bug should be highest priority, it is a SHOWSTOPPER!!
> An operating system without mail and addresses is doomed! Such a fragile Framework such as akonadi shoud be removed from the distro at this stage of development, it messes it up!
> Not only for newcomers, I have accumulated hundrets of addresses o9ver the past years and currently cannot access them!!! this is crazy!

I figured I had it fixed but it's started again! Akonadi error messages and NO Kontacts. This is really frustrating. Now I have to go searching for the problem again.
Thankfully Patrick's workaround above gets my addresses back.
Not what you would call ready for prime time.